The new North Garden at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum is going to be many things to many people.

And all good.

I toured the space for the first time during Friday’s formal dedication and am looking forward to many more trips, especially for music under the covered, open-air pavilion with room for 500 or so seats.

There was plenty of praise on Friday for the vision of the late scholar and philanthropist Mills B. Lane IV, “a driving force” for culture in the city according to Ships of the Sea board chair Dr. John Hardman.

Joining Hardman on the dais were executive director Tony Pizzo, architect Daniel Snyder, landscape designer John McEllen and Mayor Edna Jackson, who spoke passionately about the great new addition to “West Broad Street.”

The pavilion’s openness and amenities will no doubt make it a choice location for all types of public and private events, but I’d encourage residents to spend some time looking at the layout of the garden on their own.

As McEllen explained, the garden has five separate “rooms” that transition smoothly from one to the other.

A relatively small group of plantings near the entrance on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard gives way quickly to a dense maple grove reminiscent of Paris. The pavilion is flanked by a small citrus grove and a more casual garden of native plants.

One of the goals, McEllen noted, was eventually to achieve the “almost overgrown” effect that Mills B. Lane loved.

The garden will be open to the public throughout the day and offers free wireless.

Urban planner Christian Sottile, now dean of SCAD’s School of Building Arts, was among those taking in the space after Friday’s ceremony.

“It’s time to bring our west boundary back to West Boundary,” Sottile told me as we stood atop the North Garden’s belvedere, with the maple grove to one side and a long view of the bridge in the distance.

Sottile was referring to a variety of recent efforts to bring the historic areas between MLK (formerly West Broad Street) and West Boundary Street into more active interplay with the rest of the Historic District.

Despite relatively recent attempts at revitalization, MLK in recent decades has been treated more as a dividing line than as a historic corridor uniting various land uses to the east and west.

I don’t know if the North Garden will change the public’s perceptions about the corridor itself, but the new space will enrich the life of the city in myriad ways.